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Joe McQuaid's Publisher's Notebook: Fun at the Deerfield Fair, info at the expo

IKE, MIKE, AND SPIKE may want to go to the Deerfield Fair this weekend. If they do, the fair vendors had better count their change.

It happens that all three of these mini-Marx Brothers are now attending the same school, which happens to be in the same building in which their grandfather still toils. They sometimes pay me a visit.

I would like to think it’s to see me, but I know it is the box of coins on my desk that attracts them more. The coins lead straight to the snack machine down the hall. Vitamin-lacking chips are a favorite.

Spike, the youngest, likes to put in the quarters and pick his snack all by himself. When change is returned and I attempt to take it to return to the box, he howls.

“That’s mine!’’ he protested one day last week.

I think the kid is destined for a job with the IRS.

If they get to go to the fair, the variety of vitamin-depleted snacks will no doubt dazzle them. But there’s more than food there. There are rides and tractors and little pigs (catchable and otherwise) and roosters and Peter St. James from WTPL.

Why I thought of Peter and roosters together, I have no idea. But Peter will be broadcasting his live morning show there this Thursday and Friday.

The fair runs through Sunday but if you are making weekend plans, don’t forget the Silver Linings Senior Healthy Living Expo that we are sponsoring at Manchester Community College this Saturday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.

More than 40 exhibitors have signed up to be there, and there is a great variety of programs that will be put on throughout the day. Everything from healthy living and fraud protection to retirement communities is on the menu. And it’s all for free, which is a concept that Ike, Mike, and certainly Spike understand well.

Speaking of free money, I see where the Town of Durham has eradicated the plague that was Christopher Columbus and will instead celebrate indigent people in October. If I have it right, Columbus wiped out a bunch of poor people back in the day so he could pave over Paradise and put up a parking lot and ATM.

It would have been better, Durham folk believe, if Columbus had stayed home and let overcrowded Europe sink. Of course, that would have meant there would be no Durham folk here to celebrate much of anything, not even Leif Erickson Day, which used to be a big to-do in that town.